Businesses around the globe are constantly striving to reduce operating costs in order to improve profitability. Additionally, the population of work-at-home employees has been steadily increasing in recent years. The practice of utilizing conference calls helps companies reduce travel costs and enables work-at-home and remote users. Conference calls can often involve large numbers of people, often as many as a dozen and sometimes numbers into the hundreds.
There are often times when a sub-group of people on a conference call wish to communicate privately amongst themselves. For example, two participants of a conference call may want to confer with each other on a private matter without other participants of a conference call being able to observe or hear the conversation. This is commonly referred to as a sidebar.
One way such sidebar communications may be performed during conference calls is via instant messaging. Instant messaging allows for simultaneous communication channels (e.g., one voice channel for the conference call and one instant messaging channel for the sidebar) with a different set of people. Conducting a sidebar using instant messaging requires that each member of the sidebar use a computer to conduct the instant messaging; however, participants of a conference call commonly connect via their telephone only, and do not have ready access to a computer during the conference call. Even when conference call participants do have a computer and Internet connection, they commonly require special firewall access in business situations (e.g., a virtual private network (VPN) at remote sites) in order to connect to each other. Moreover, the communication medium of instant messaging does not offer the same context and speed and type of information as that of voice.
Another way to perform sidebar communications during a conference call is to ask those participants already on the conference call to hold while the sidebar initiator puts everyone else on mute. The sidebar initiator then uses another (e.g., second) phone or phone line and initiates another independent call to one or more parties on the original call. However, it typically costs more to establish another conference bridge between the multiple parties of the sidebar. Moreover, asking everyone else to hold creates a disruption to the original conference call. Additionally, the members of the sidebar are isolated from the original conference call and cannot follow what is being said on the primary call while the sidebar is in progress. Also, it takes a significant amount of time to locate the phone numbers of those that are to be part of the secondary call.